100 board games!! Bronze Board Game collector award from Board Game Geek!

 We did it! Somehow we have managed to rack up a collection of 100 boardgames (in one form or another)!! Everything from simple card games to complex multi-piece games. Although we have a core group of actual games we play, 100 is 100. I applied for and was awarded the Copper Boardgame Collector award!

Test play of Smallworld - fairly good reception

 Today we had a test play of Smallworld - I'd been wanting to play this for a while, but I knew it was a fairly complex game with a long play time and therefore would need everyone around the table to grasp the rules. I rounded up the girls and set up the map for a 4 player game and hoped that it wouldn't appear to complex - Smallworld follows the rule of 'If it looks nice, it's complex to play, but it isn't' - others that follow this rule are 7 Wonders and Stone Age. And Smallworld is beautiful looking. But is very easy to play. The girls took a while to convince it was good, but after choosing their favourite team and starting to attacking various lands and eventually each other, they soon warmed to it. We played a few rounds and they really enjoyed it. Look forward to playing a full game next time with everyone.

Some more Forbidden Island

Today we had a nice simple game of Forbidden Island, this time with all of us playing; Maya playing alongside Anita as she had not played before. But as hard as tried, after capturing 3 of the treasures, the last treasure island piece sank! Game over!

Another boardgame night at Battlequest...oh and 7 Wonders Leaders arrives!!

 Another great night of board gaming at Andys BattleQuest Games last night - I turned up with Cargo Noir and Citadels, but there was already several games underway. Whitechapel and Merchants & Marauders was underway, but a game of Last Night on Earth with 5 players was just about to start, so I joined in for a 6-er (I think I pinched Andys seat - sorry for that!) and played as one of the two zombie players. The mission was the basic Zombie Hunter - take out 15 zombies. It was a close call half way through as time was running out and the humans had only taken out about 3 or 4 zombies, but then the tide turned and they were dropping like flies! No matter what we tried, nothing could stop the humans. The main turning point was when most of the players gained guns and were shooting zombies from a distance - it turned into a duck shoot lol. Great game.

Then we had a 4 player game of 7 Wonders, with two of the guys being newbies, so they had some catching up to do, but they did well - but Andy stormed the game with a massive military show and won with change to spare. When then had a "filler" game from Neil called The Stars are Right - which I thought would be a TV quiz show game form the sounds of it; turned out to be a card game based on Call of Cthulu; it was ok, but very complex - perhaps because I was tired and the ol' brain was flagging lol. All in all, a great night as usual.

Oh, and there was the small matter of 7 Wonders : Leaders turning up!!! Anita will be happy!

Stone Age completes our collection of 10 out of the top 11 Family Games!

 Today we picked up Stone Age - I'd asked Andy at Battlequest to keep a copy behind as as quickly as it is reprinted, it goes out of stock and I'd heard so many good things about this game - but the problem was that it was 4 players max and we are a family of 5. Checking out the game, we found that the strategy may have been a little over Mayas head, so we opted to go for the game with Maya playing alongside someone else, or rolling the dice.

We had a play of the game after I had a go through the rules and played a few demo rounds. The artwork is beautiful and the components look and feel great. The game comes with a number of dice and a snazzy leather cup to give it a authentic Stone Age feel - all we need now was scraps of clothes and shaggy hair (and a beard for me!).

Although the artwork is beautiful, and therefore giving the game an air of complexity, the actual game is not complex at all, even though there is a lot to it. The basis of the game is to keep your family alive in the Tribe whilst harvesting resources like stone, gold, wood, bricks to trade in for scoring Building cards - which score immediately - and Civilisation cards - which score at the end of the game. The player has a set number of meeples to decide on each turn what they are going to do with them; send some for hunting for food, making tools to make the task of resource and food gathering easier, go looking for resources, attempt to make a new scoring house etc. Each one of these locations on the board has a set number of free spaces (from unlimited for food, to one for Tool Making) to place your meeples per round - a round being a choice of placing your meeples before passing to the next player and around all the players until the last meeples are placed.

Therefore you as a player have some tough decisions to make as it is not possible to cover all the bases per turn - do you go and gather food (you start with some food to live on at the start but this starts to dwindle per turn), or advance your knowledge of agriculture, or make new tools or go for a Civilisation card etc. There is even the possibility of increasing the size of your "family" of meeples by using the "woohoo baby maker" hut as we came to call it :) And so at the end of the round, all of the meeples are placed then everyone takes turns to complete the actions of their meeples depending where they have been placed - pick up a house card, gather resources, take a new tool etc.

At the heart of the resource gathering is a dice based mechanism. The more people you have place on a particular resource, the more dice you get to throw. The numbers are added and then the total is divided by an amount, depending on how rare the resource is - gold is harder to find than say wood. For example, if finding wood, a a player with 4 meeples would throw for dice and divide it by 3. A throw of 12 would equal 4 pieces of wood etc.

The only downside to this is what if people fail to purchase civilisation and building cards as we were doing; we were gathering and surviving and not really advancing. What happens there is that the resources on the table start to be used up - it's not necessarily a flaw in the game, but a question maybe not answered by the designers "Of course people won't hoard resources". The result of this is that items can run out - the rules answer to this is to add to the resources with matchsticks for example. But I guess this will happen less with time.

All in all this is a fantastic game with lots to see, lots going on and lots to do. The game does look complicated but in fact is quite easy to play and everyone knew what was going on.

Birthday game vouchers ahoy!!

Had a nice birthday which involved £50 of battlequestgames vouchers plus £10 from my loyalty card which was full. Mmmm now what do I get with these???
In the evening we also had a game of Scandinavian Ticket to Ride - Anita won - and a 5 player 7 Wonders which Kavita won.

Oops...not gamed or blogged in a while!!

Sorry folks, been a long while since I posted - basically it's because we've been busy and away on holiday in Cyprus! A nice week away in glorious sun...so lovely we didn't want to come back! But we did and back to reality. And playing games! A few things have happened recently, which I'll catch up on.

Firstly there was the regular meet up at Andys at the beginning of the month, played some games; Forbidden Island (A simpler version of the game mechanics of Pandemic), the worlds longest game of Fluxx, Mow, Metro and some odd wooden game with round stacked pieces; it was odd but fun - the game, not Andys get together which was great as usual.

Afterwards we also got Forbidden Island because the girls were really interested in it after seeing it laid out at Andys place. I took them through the rules and bought a copy - only £16! We've played a couple of games so far, both 3 player - one win and one loss. That will become a nice filler fav! We also played a game of 7 Wonders last week for the first time in ages whilst Kavita was out for a birthday treat. Another great 4 player game - I won with a massive 66 points - a record win so far!!

It's Fathers Dad this weekend, so I hope we'll get a chance for a few more games - including a first test of Smallworld.